The March Out, by Rufus Zogbaum.
During the Victorio campaign of 1880, supply
trains with cavalry or infantry escorts shuttled between Fort Davis and
the troops campaigning in the deserts to the west.

The Fight at Quitman Canyon

THE MILITARY AUTHORITIES KNEW
that Victorio would soon enter the United States once
more and probably head straight for the Mescalero country
of southern New Mexico. Colonel Grierson was determined that West Texas
would not serve as the pathway. He concentrated eight troops of the 10th
Cavalry at Fort Davis and went there himself. Also at his command were
the four companies of the 24th Infantry under Lt. Col. John E. Yard
already stationed at Davis, a troop of the 8th Cavalry, and a detachment
of Pueblo scouts recruited at the old Indian towns of Socorro and
Ysleta, below El Paso. Captain Baylor's Texas Rangers, based at Ysleta,
stood ready to help. As it had in 1855, Fort Davis was to serve as a
supply center and communications link with San Antonio. The infantrymen
organized wagon and pack trains to shuttle supplies from Fort Davis to
the cavalry columns lacing the deserts to the west.

Grierson strengthened the subposts along the Rio
Grande at Viejo Pass, Eagle Springs, and old Fort Quitman, which had
been abandoned as a permanent post 3 years earlier. On July 27 he was at
Quitman, and the next day he learned that Victorio
was headed north toward the Rio Grande. Determined to
block the way with troops summoned from the subposts, the colonel and a
small escort rode eastward from Quitman on July 29. They crossed the
Quitman Mountains and dropped into Quitman Canyon. At a waterhole known
as Tinaja de las Palmas, a courier from Capt. John C. Gilmore,
commanding at Eagle Springs, rode up with word that Victorio and 150
warriors had crossed the river, fired on two patrols, and were riding up
Quitman Canyon. Grierson knew that they would have to stop at Tinaja de
las Palmas the next day for water. His escortan officer, six men,
and his teenage son Robertfortified the waterhole and waited.
That night Victorio and his warriors camped in the canyon 10 miles to
the south.

Stagecoaches passed in the night, the drivers taking
word to the subposts at Eagle Springs and Quitman to send reinforcements
at once. At 4 a.m. Lt. Leighton Finley and 15 cavalrymen reached
Grierson. Captain Gilmore had sent him to escort the colonel to Eagle
Springs. "As I had no thought of being escorted there, or anywhere
else," Grierson later wrote, "I immediately sent two of these men back
with peremptory orders that all available cavalry be at once sent to my
support." Twenty-three men now held the rock fortifications that had
been erected.

At 9 on the morning of July 30 the Apaches approached
the waterhole and, seeing the troopers, attempted to bypass it on the
east. At Grierson's order, Lieutenant Finley with 10 men charged. The
Indians stopped to return the fire. After a skirmish lasting about an
hour, Captain Viele with Troops C and G of the 10th Cavalry charged down
the road from Eagle Springs and joined the battle. His advance, however,
mistook Finley's detachment for Indians and opened fire, forcing it to
withdraw to the waterhole. The Apaches followed in a wild charge. "We
then let fly from our fortifications at the Indians about 300 yards
off," wrote young Robert Grierson in his diary, "& golly you ought
to've seen 'em turn tail & strike for the hills. . . . As it was the
sons of guns nearly jumped out of their skins getting away." In another
hour of skirmishing, Viele fought his way through to Grierson. Again the
Apaches tried to break through to the north; again the cavalry cut them
off and forced them back. At this moment Capt. Nicholas Nolan and Troop
A of the 10th, riding from Quitman in response to the colonel's summons,
charged into the fight. The Indians gave up the struggle and scattered
southward toward the Rio Grande.

Grierson had lost one man killed and Lt. R. S.
Colladay wounded. The fight had cost Victorio seven killed and a large
number wounded. It also turned him back to Mexico. But Grierson knew
that his adversary would soon return, and he went to Eagle Springs to
wait.